3 Valspon (Extinct)
Name: Valspon
Descendant of: Sponshade
Description: A simple animal that, like it's ancestors always have, filter feeds by cilliating water through spongy channels throughout it's body, from back (light brown) to front gills (dark reddish brown). It's waste slag heap (dark green with sponphage growth) builds around it. It's diagonally horizontal orientation helps it catch more food while heavier detritus like sand and stones roll off. It's lower sections stretch with age before reaching a maximum limit in length, lifting them away from their own waste slag heap. The organisms range in size from subspecies to subspecies, individual to individual. Some as wide as dinner tables, others only as large as dinner plates.
To prevent and combat fungal infestation they have further adaptations. A smoother surface with a mucous layer, fewer grooves for sponphage to take hold in and less penetrable to an encroaching mycellial network or the emerging hyphae of a fertilized germinating spore. The gills have been replaced with an exit layer that is similar in structure to the upper intake layer, except the underside has one-way exit valves in it's pores to prevent sponphage spores or hyphae from entering.
The channels and pores are slightly larger to accomodate flushing with great volumes of generated mucous during infestations. This means the cillia also have to be larger and of greater quantity to catch food and filter non-foods in the larger channels.
The outer cells of the embryos also have cillia, just like the feeding cillia of the internal channels of the adult. If the outer cells of the embryos detect the antibiotic secretions of sponphage, they flap in a unified direction from one "pole" of the spherical embryo to the other. This sometimes casts them back adrift again, giving them another chance to find a cleaner anchoring area. They can't do this many times however as they tire easily and their ability to digest food that they contact is minimal.
Reproduction: It reproduces sexually by spawning. It casts off eggs that become sticky embryos and latch on to rock and some stromatolites before they metamorphize into the adult.
Food: Suspended organic detritus
Ocean Locations: 2
Land Locations: None
Temporal Range: Age 1 - Age 4
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